In my previous post, I referred to the late Lord Longford’s A History of the House of Lords. In it, he refers to the post-war House and the work of the then Marquess of Salisbury, a Conservative Cabinet minister in the 1950s and an advocate of reform of the House; his pressure was probably responsible…
This weekend’s quiz questions. The House of Commons has a promiment member who is blind (David Blunkett, a university classmate of mine.) He is not the first blind member to sit in the House of Commons. The House of Lords also has had a number of members who have been blind. One of them was…
For those wishing to see the programme broadcast on BBC Parliament to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Life Peerages Act, you can find it at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fzc1j/Peers_Progress/ You will see some familiar faces from this blog, including Baroness d’Souza, Lord Tyler and myself. I hasten to add that none of us was in the Lords fifty…
This Sunday (30 November) BBC Parliament will be showing an evening of programmes to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Life Peerages Act. It will include a feature on one of the first women peers, Baroness Wootton of Abinger. The 1958 Act has been the basis for the transformation of the second…
Not everyone gets a chance to visit the Palace of Westminster, a point that has been made by one or two visitors to this site. There are some virtual tours available on the Parliament website. Though second-best to an actual visit, some have the advantage of covering parts of the Palace not open to the…
